Sunday, August 30, 2009

The 1U Olive

NOTE: Of course, you can build a VMWare Olive, but I don’t want to use my current machine for that. If that suits your needs, check it out: Building a Juniper 'Olive' running latest JUNOS in VMWare.

Getting back into Juniper has been great so far, most especially because of the Fast Track materials. That stated, I still need to get a little more hands-on with JUNOS. I recently built one Olive already, with a plan to add a couple more eventually. My first Olive is contained in a 4U server rackmount case. That’s a space eater. A good friend of mine with a firewall background (who also is using Fast Track) thought it might be possible to use a 1U Nokia IP330. His company had several they were about to toss, so what the hey right?

1. I had to connect the Hard Drive from the IP330 to my first Olive (in place of the current working HD). The IDE port on the IP330 motherboard has an extra pin which prevented me from connecting a standard IDE cable with master and slave connectors for dual use of the HD and CD ROM.

2. I installed FreeBSD mini 4.4 per Sid Smokes.Juniper Olive Install: Juniper Olive has more granular instructions for basic *nix folks like myself. These sites also contain the instructions for loading JUNOS. Note: For my initial installation I used jinstall-7.4R1.7-export-signed.tgz and I upgraded to jinstall-8.3R2.8-export-signed. I don’t have enough RAM to upgrade to jinstall-9.x …yet.

3. When the install of FreeBSD completed (and rebooted), I logged in as root to complete the file system changes. I then mounted the cdrom and copied the jninstall to the /var/temp (as per the above instructions).

4. I then ran the pkg_add command. Once that completes a "reboot" will need to be issued. (This is normal so far). After I issued the "reboot" the machine began to reboot (of course). When it powered down, and before it powered up, I manually turned off the power to that machine.

While probably not an issue for only one IP330 Olive, all of my IP330 Olives assigned a dummy MAC address (of 02:00:0X:00:00:04) to the respective fxp ports on each Olive. You can manually change the MAC address to avoid duplicates:

9 comments:

Seraphus, I actually posted this on the techexam forum, but no response there unfortunately.

I created 2 IP330 Olives, but I can't upgrade them to 8.X like you can. In fact when I boot mine up after upgrading, it says it can't determine the class of CPU. The CPU on these boards are K6-2's just like yours.

I stopped visiting Techexams to focus more on certs. Thanks for posting here. I found that upgrading to 8.x had to be done incrementally, moving from 7.5 to 8.1 to 8.3, etc. I take you post to mean that you have a lower version of Junos installed, it that correct?

I've currently for 7.1 R2.2 installed. (check here http://mellowd.co.uk/ccie/?p=1075) Heck I should change that link to come directly here instead.

I could try to install 8.1 first and then 8.3 and see what happens. I think I went straight to 8.4 or 8.5?

One more thing. I bought a lot of 5 IP330's off ebay. 2 of them are the white and blue coloured ones and 3 are pure white. The pure white seem like later models. However only the 2 blue and white ones work for me. I initially thought the white models just wouldn't work, but I see in your lab you have a number of white models working just fine.

I've even tried taking the hard drive out of the working blue and white into a white and it still refuses to do anything. You basically see 'AT' and then nothing. I've left it for ovger and hour and no change :(

I have no problems with the either models, once I got the first one working. A note though: I could never get JUNOS to install on an IBM hard drive, only on the Western Digitals so I had to replace some of the drives. I have even installed JUNOS on IP440s which is a little easier as it is similar to a PC Olive, though compatible network cards have to be installed.

I have to check and see exactly what I'm running on my IP330s. I've stopped all progress on Juniper to prepare for the CCIE. The old JNCIP (JNCIP-M) was supposed to be doable using Olives, but I'm not sure how much you can prepare for the new JNCIP (JNCIP-SP) using Olives.

I've managed to get the plain white boxes running now. Essentially that means I've got 2X white IP330's, 1 white & blue IP330 and 1 white and blue VPN220 all working with 8.2 currently (I want to get them up to 8.4 at least)

I was able to get them working with a mixture of Seagate and Western Digital drives. Drives have to be less than 20GB (I think less than 32GB in fact, but not tested)

I've actually managed to install JUNOS 10 on my M10 I have in the lab, so at least I have 1 real Juniper (http://mellowd.co.uk/ccie/?p=1188)